Question: Maybe I missed something, but how was Esther able to fool everyone practically all her life and hide the fact that she's a 33-year old sociopath? When Kate finally learns the truth by getting the phone call, they show a photo of the "real" Esther, so at least those records of her exist somewhere. How could the boarding school not have known her true identity?
Answer: High quality makeup was an important part of her disguise as the alternative ending make apparent. Her fake freckles were the master's touch.
Question: Can someone verify the number of gunshots fired by Esther at the end of the film? I thought I counted 7 and I assume a revolver has only 6 bullets in the cylinder.
Answer: The scene when Esther takes 4 bullets out of the gun and asks Max if she wants to play shows that the gun has a 5 bullet capacity. Esther fired 1 bullet at Kate's shoulder, 1 at a glass when Kate was on top of the glass roof and 3 other bullets at Max. At the end of the movie Max fires an extra bullet.
Question: When Esther is being taken to her new home, Sister Abigail is seen with her fingers crossed behind her back. Did she do this because she knew how evil Esther was and she wanted to keep that fact a secret, or because she knew Esther's secret and was actually lying about Esther in hopes of getting rid of her more quickly?
Answer: I would say your first guess is correct, Sister Abigail suspected Esther's true, sinister nature while everyone else saw her as an innocent child. Later in the film, she tells the mother her suspicions but was never able to prove Esther's wrongdoing. She may have also been crossing her fingers hoping that it was the last time she would ever have to see Esther. It's highly unlikely Sister Abigail knew Esther's secret or else she would have alerted the authorities.
Question: I'm a little confused as to the reason why Esther wore dentures. Obviously she had to conceal her bad teeth to A) have a better chance of getting adopted and B) try to seduce the men in the families she lived with. But why didn't she just let someone in one of the orphanages see her real teeth and take her to a dentist/orthodontist? Seems a lot easier than having to wear dentures all the time, not to mention always being worried about someone discovering them.
Answer: Also, the dentist would have realised her age.
Answer: Esther wanted to look like a young child who still had her baby teeth. Tooth size is not linked to pituitary hormones so her normal sized adult teeth would make people wonder about her age.
Ester's real teeth were baby teeth; people with hypopituitarism retain their baby teeth well into their 40s. She did not wear dentures, she wore veneers to make it look like she had adult teeth like a normal nine-year old, Shirley Temple wore them to hide her braces they are purely cosmetic and not designed for eating which explains why Ester ate funny and didn't want to go to the dentist. She probably murdered the dentist that made them for her in some horrible way.
Question: When John discovers the disturbing paintings in Esther's room towards the end of the movie, a couple of them are life-size depictions of 2 people in sexual acts. To me, the man and the woman look like John and a "normal" sized Esther, as if she painted the scenario that she would have liked for herself. Did I see that correctly or were those just 2 random people?
Question: When Brenda and Esther were fighting over the bible in the school scene and all the pages were ripped out of it, where were the pictures of the men in the bible? Like did no-one see it?
Answer: If you watch closely, when Esther is carrying the bible (before Daniel knocks it out of her hand), it does look like the pictures are in the pages. However, when the papers scatter, the pictures are not visible on the floor. They were covered by the pile of pages on the floor. The pictures must have been there, or else Esther wouldn't have been panicking to gather all of the pages.
Question: What did they use to make her paintings neon? Like UV paint? But how come you can't see it in the first part like any paint and then when the light goes on it's neon colours?
Answer: There is such a thing as black light paint and you can even get special paint that is invisible until you expose it to UV light.
Answer: The boarding school was going by the falsified records that Esther had with her. They did not suspect anything, so they had no reason to dig any further at the time.
wizard_of_gore ★